Archive for the ‘Personality’ Category

Willpower

Posted: March 23, 2012 in Book Reviews, Business, Personal Development, Personality
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We all need willpower to succeed in school, business, our relationships, our careers, life. I’ve written a lot over the years about the need for resilience and robustness. Willpower is also fundamental to these, so you don’t give up at the first signs of trouble.

There are two very recent books on willpower that are definitely worth reading and that should be in your library if you’re serious about self-development. The first isWillpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength. It’s written by the researcher who was instrumental in putting the science of willpower on a sound footing through experimentation, Roy F. Baumeister, and science journalist John Tierney. The book reads well and is in the style of many of the new popular science books, with a combination of hard scientific fact, anecdote, and the occasional first-person account.

The main thing I learned is that willpower is something we can control, but not by exercising more willpower. Instead, the authors focus on different areas of endeavour to show that willpower is largely a function of circumstances, physiological functioning, habits, and skills. In other words, there really IS a science of willpower, and it offers insights to improve how we function in all aspects of our lives. I was particularly interested in the authors’ discussion of ways to get more organized. They show how David Allen’s Getting Things Done approach to time and work management is so successful because he has apparently stumbled on to a series of skills that work with our human nature, rather than trying to go against it.

It is also an approach that eschews senseless moralizing, and that is a fundamental theme in the other book on willpower, The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, And What You Can Do to Get More of It, by Kelly McGonigal, Ph.D. McGonigal teaches a continuing education course on self-control and willpower at Stanford University, and it is apparently one of their most successful courses open to the public.

There is a considerable overlap in the scientific information presented in this book as compared to the first one I’ve mentioned. However, this book is much more practical, and I would think also more interesting to the average reader. The author has structured the book to follow her course. She has included exercises to develop self-control and willpower and that have proven effective for most of her students in her course. She has also been able to include a large number of relevant examples from some of her students. This makes the information that much more interesting and shows that the reader’s self-control goals are quite attainable.

As mentioned above, the author states that willpower is definitely NOT about morality. In fact, McGonigal has a whole chapter devoted to that fact. She shows that couching things in terms of good and bad are not useful to developing self-control. In fact, they can be counter-productive as they can produce perverse results and unintended consequences. I also learned that willpower is like a muscle. It can be developed and honed over time, but you need to have the right tools to do so. This book gives much of the same information as Willpower, but the exercises are focused on skill building, not just generalities about gaining willpower or applying the scientific findings of the research. An interesting point about those exercises is that most focus on developing self-awareness. If you know the science and can then watch yourself in action, you will be able to apply the self-control techniques to achieve your willpower goals.

Overall I foundThe Willpower Instinct a better and more useful book. However,Willpower rounds out some of the scientific information and provides insight into the historical development of the field, as one of its authors was one of its founders.

Here’s some willpower advice. Exercise self-control; get both, and you won’t have any regrets.

© 2012 Richard Martin. Reproduction and quotes permitted with full and proper attribution.

Leadership Principle # 4 – Lead by Example

Posted: February 23, 2012 in Brilliant Manoeuvres, Business, Crisis Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Ethics, Leadership, Leadership Principles, Management, Military Lessons, Personal Development, Personality
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Lead by example. We all know it’s an important leadership principle. Some would say it’s THE most important leadership principle. I remember when I was still in the Canadian Army. One day, we were being addressed by our general and he said, “Ladies and gentlemen, what is the most important principle of leadership?” Most of the officers in the room immediately shouted out, “Lead by example!”

Why is leading by example so important? I think there are three main reasons. The first is that people want to follow someone they believe is worthy of being followed. This means that the leader must demonstrate the qualities of character, commitment, and attitude that the organization or team espouses. In other words, the leader must set the standard and be a model for others. The best way to do this is by leading by example.

The second main reason leading by example is so important is that you can’t as a leader (or in general for that matter) ask someone to do something that you can’t or, worse, aren’t willing to do yourself. People tend to view leaders who say one thing and do another as hypocritical. It undermines morale and cohesion in the team, and it separates the leader from his or her followers.

The final reason, and perhaps the most important one, is that leadership means being in front, by definition. If you want someone to attack that hill, then you had better be close to the front so that others will follow you. If you want people to adopt certain behaviours in your organization, you have to be willing to adopt them yourself, and before all the others. This doesn’t mean you have to be the best at absolutely everything, but it does mean you have to be willing to move first, to take the same risks as everyone else, and be where the decision point is. You can’t do that from the safety of your bunker.

© 2012 Richard Martin. Reproduction and quotes permitted with full and proper attribution.

Leadership Principle # 3 – Seek and Accept Responsibility

Posted: February 22, 2012 in Brilliant Manoeuvres, Business, Crisis Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Leadership Principles, Management, Military Lessons, Personal Development, Personality
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By definition, a leader is someone who is out in front, who takes personal risks to get others to do something they wouldn’t necessarily want or think to do themselves. Responsibility is therefore the very essence of leadership. If you want to test your own leadership propensity, watch how often you yourself take the lead, willingly go out in front and say, “It’s okay, everyone. I’ll do it.” Or simply, “I know what to do, or where to go. Follow me.”

There are two aspects to responsibility. The first is responsibility itself, the willingness to take on a task or other burden for the benefit of others. The other aspect, and perhaps even more critical, is that of accountability. The word responsibility contains the root ‘response.’ In other words, someone who is responsible is someone who is answerable for his or her decisions and actions. This is compounded when you take on the responsibilities of a leader by the fact that the leader becomes answerable not just for him- or herself, but also for the decisions and actions of others. That is what separates true leaders from people who just claim to be leading.

The willingness to seek and accept responsibility therefore boils down to a willingness to decide on behalf of the group, or society, or an organization or team, to make plans, give direction, to act accordingly. To answer for all of that, to give account of it. Finally, we can see that leadership is therefore a profoundly ethical practice.

© 2012 Richard Martin. Reproduction and quotes permitted with full and proper attribution.

Leadership Principle #1 – Achieve professional competence

Posted: February 20, 2012 in Business, Leadership, Leadership Principles, Military Lessons, Personal Development, Personality
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The first leadership principle is to achieve professional competence. People willingly follow leaders they trust to bring them success. That’s right, leadership is about the ability to achieve results for others, not just for oneself. As humans, we are naturally attracted to people who are go-getters and can actually get things done.

In other words, the fundamental principle of leadership is to be competent. If you’re competent, people will aggregate around you simply because you have the ability and the skills to make things happen. If you’re successful on top of that, you can make them successful, and people like that even more. It’s a recipe for basic leadership effectiveness: be competent.

There are four types of competence: intellectual, physical, emotional, and interpersonal. However, the most important one is intellectual competence, which is the ability to size up a situation, make decisions and plans, communicate the vision and the plan, and control the execution. You can miss some of these, but intellectual competence as a leader can’t be faked.

Franklin Roosevelt had the intellectual firepower, even though he was in a wheelchair during most of his presidency. He was also a masterful communicator. Churchill and Lincoln both suffered terribly from emotional upheaval, depression and anxiety even, but they were also brilliant leaders who could communicate and rouse others to action.

Steve Jobs was, by all accounts, bizarre in his personal habits, extremely difficult to work for, and hard to get along with as a person, but boy, could he conceptualize technology and see the interactions between technique and art. People willingly followed him not because he was a nice guy or easy to work for, but for quite the contrary. He demanded only the best of everyone, and he got it, or else the person was gone.

© 2012 Richard Martin. Reproduction and quotes permitted with full and proper attribution.

Conflicted About Conflict?

Posted: September 1, 2011 in Business, Ethics, Leadership, Leadership Catalyst Newsletter, Management, Personal Development, Personality
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Conflict isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Yes, it can sap the energy and resolve of managers, entrepreneurs, and employees, undermining morale and effectiveness in the process. But, it can also invigorate a discussion, create healthy rivalry, expose problems for resolution, and stimulate the creative juices of stakeholders to come up with innovative solutions. The key is to manage conflict, rather than trying to avoid it.

Here is what happens when you try to avoid conflict. It goes underground. It generates seething resentment and unhealthy rivalries. Bystanders feel they have to take sides or risk being left in the cold on important decisions. It’s much better to keep the issues likely to lead to conflict near the surface, or to uncover them if they are in danger of sinking into the morass.

There is no point in avoiding conflict. Any time two or more people get together with a goal of achieving something of significance, there are bound to be disagreements as to what the goal is, why it is important, and the best means of achieving it. Therefore conflict can exist at three levels: values (the why), goals (the what), and means (the how).

Some of my work with clients involves the identification and analysis of issues that, if managed incorrectly or left unattended, can easily descend into unhealthy conflict. I also face actual and potential conflicts in my own life. Sometimes this involves other people, but it can also be internal, where there is misalignment between my values, goals, and approaches. When you’re working to resolve, reduce, or, in a more positive sense, canalize conflicts toward productive ends, the first step is to identify the stakeholders in the disagreement. Who are the direct parties to the conflict? Are there others who can be affected indirectly? To what extent?

The second step is to determine if it is a conflict about values, goals, or means. If the conflict is about values, it may not be possible to reconcile the parties. If it’s about goals, there is a better chance of achieving consensus. This usually involves a question of priorities, because there are never enough resources and time to achieve all the goals at once. Sometimes it is better to sequence them in time, or to allocate resources that are commensurate with the importance or criticality of the goal. If there is agreement about values and goals, then the only other substantive source of conflict is disagreement about means to achieve the goals.

We often hear talk of “personality conflicts,” where two people supposedly have so much antipathy to each other that they can’t possibly work together to resolve their differences. While I agree that personality incompatibilities do exist, in most cases, these are symptomatic of deeper conflicts that come from a misalignment of values, goals, and means. In other words, “personality conflicts” are usually an effect of substantive conflicts, not a cause.

When I’m working with others to help them resolve or manage conflicts, I always start by asking each party what their respective goals are, or what outcome they would consider in their best interest. What is it that they are seeking? If the conflict is very heated, it may be necessary to ask each party separately. If possible, though, it is better to do this in each other’s presence. The basic rule is that they have to listen to each other without interrupting. In practice, there can be a lot of emotion involved, and sometimes there is a need to express themselves and give their perspective on the other party’s position. This is okay, as long as they are giving concrete facts and examples, and not trying to impute motives to the other party. The key advantage of focusing on goals and outcomes is that it operationalizes the conflict. It shows everybody involved that it is about achieving something, much more than it is about who somebody supposedly is, or why he or she is supposedly acting in a certain way. In other words, goals are tangible and can be achieved. Conversely, trying to change someone else’s personality is always doomed to fail. Once the starting positions are known, we can start to work toward a resolution. In many if not most cases I find that there is more common ground than the parties are initially willing to concede. I often find that they are saying nearly the same thing, but using different terminology or giving differing weight to factors and criteria.

The important thing to remember in all of this is that people hold their beliefs for reasons that they think are valid. There is no point in denigrating someone else’s values or goals or approaches to a problem, because they will always look slightly less rational than one’s own particular mix. The solution is to take the parties’ statements at face value and seek common ground. Sometimes the residual areas of disagreement are insurmountable, and the best solution is temporary or permanent separation. In practice, though, the residual disagreements can usually be parked for the time being while the main conflict is worked out, or mechanisms can be put in place to compensate for the remaining issues or minimize them in the bigger scheme of things.

© Alcera Consulting Inc. 2011. We encourage the sharing of this information with attribution. All other rights reserved.

Galoping Leopards and their Spots

Posted: July 13, 2011 in Personal Development, Personality
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As we say in French, plus çà change, plus c’est la même chose. We also say la nature revient vite au galop. Loosely translated, that means that nature always comes galoping back. Another way of saying a leopard can’t change it’s spots.

All these aphorisms convey the folk wisdom that people are basically the way they are, and that not much can change them. I know, that sounds so final, but I’ve been doing a ton of reading on the topic of personality, intelligence, performance and other life outcomes. Basically, what the research shows is that our personalities and talents are about 50% heritable on average. In other words, about half of who we are is directly attributable to our genetic makeup. The other half represents environmental influences, but even then, it appears that these can be strongly mediated by inherited traits and dispositions.

It seems we just can’t deny the fact that the old nature vs nurture debate is coming out strongly in favour of nature. Consider the following:

  • By the time of adulthood, about 80 % of the average person’s IQ is attributable to genetics. In other words, you inherit most of your cognitive abilities.
  • Families affect personality and cognition while a person is growing up in that family, but once they are out of the nest, individuals tend pretty much to revert to their natural disposition. They make choices and behave in a manner that corresponds to their personality, character, and intelligence.
  • Training has a limited impact on native intellectual capacity. Individuals can learn task-specific skills, but they don’t get translated to other domains unless they have sufficient intelligence to allow this to occur.
  • The overarching general factor of intelligence, known as g and measured in scholastic achievement tests and various IQ metrics, is the most consistent and predictive dispositional trait of all.
  • General intelligence is not domain-specific. It can be applied to good effect across all domains, though with varying degrees of success and performance. I also estimate that it interacts with more domain-specific skills to create occasionally outstanding results. For instance, an individual with high cognitive capacity who also happens to have outstanding athletic talents and a temperament and energy-level suited to the sacrifices and singleness of purpose required to excel in a sporting activity may actually reach very high levels of competency in that sport, maybe even world-class level.
  • The greatest predictor of job performance is this same general factor of intelligence. The greatest correlation between IQ scores and job performance is for high-intellectual content work, such as senior executives, lawyers, doctors, etc., especially occupations requiring independence, decision-making, leadership, communication, and the ability to assimilitate large quantities of information and to learn quickly and consistently.
  • The second most important predictor of job performance is the personality trait known as conscientiousness. When you think of that, it makes perfect sense. For people to be effective in complex work, they need above average intelligence and must be conscientious enough to take their responsibilities and to fit into the organizational environment.

There has been a lot of information in recent years about the so called 10,000 hour rule. This states that it takes about 10,000 hours of hard practice (or 10 years) to achieve outstanding mastery of a domain. Books by Gladwell (Outliers) and Colvin (Talent Is Overrated) have been extremely popular, perhaps because they convey the idea that truly exceptional achievement is largely a question of perfecting one’s skills. It touches our egalitarian hearts to think that just about anyone can achieve just about anything if they set their minds to it. Unfortunately, I think that belief is almost completely erroneous.

In fact, I think we all can achieve something within the constraints of our talent set. However, to think someone with a, say, strong intellectual bent like me could have been an exceptional athlete or musician without the dispositions and talents to do so simply strains credibility. Given my particular talents, it is realistic that I can attain high performance and professional achievement in other areas more suited to that. As luck would have it, my temperament and personality are largely congruent with my taltents. What’s more, I think our motivations provide a strong indicator of where our true talents lie. So I have intellectual talents, but I’ve also been blessed with the disposition and motivation to develop these talents.

If I had had strong athletic abilities as a youth, other than being below average in that regard (even though I was quite fit), I probably would have been drawn to participate more in sports and to work towards excelling. Instead, I had intellectual talents and a strong sense of curiosity, which motivated me to focus on intellectual pursuits.

Those that have unusual talents and extremely high levels of persistence and motivation are usually the ones that end up as outstanding achievers in their chosen domain. The bottom line is that it’s important to know what your talents are and to strive to exploit them.

© 2011 Richard Martin. Reproduction and quotes permitted for non-commercial purposes with full and proper attribution.